Honda S2000R: The Type R That Never Existed

The Honda S2000 is considered one of the best sports cars ever produced by the brand, and for good reason. Its performance is still legendary today, and unless I'm mistaken, it still holds the record for the highest horsepower per liter for a naturally aspirated 4-cylinder production car with 124 horsepower per liter.

With such an impressive technical sheet, one could believe that the Honda S2000 had already been offered in Type R version, but that is not the case because this combination never happened. The S2000 Type R was supposed to come after the CR version, which was introduced to the market in 2008, but the Japanese manufacturer was forced to end production of its sports car during the economic crisis. The Japanese market received a Type S version for 2008 and 2009, but the S2000 Type R never materialized.

24 years later

Surprisingly, the Honda S2000 was introduced to the market in 1999 and it has not aged a bit since. It must be said that it is one of the most striking cars of its time and it is particularly popular with collectors and performance enthusiasts even today.

That's why an American company called Evasive Motorsport has decided to offer a complete overhaul of the Japanese sports car to make it as close as possible to what an S2000 Type R could have been. Of course, the American tuner cannot use the name, which is why its car is simply called S2000R. However, even though the car doesn't come directly from Honda, it is still impressive nonetheless. Evasive Motorsport has built a solid reputation over the past 20 years and specializes in modifying S2000s specifically. With its knowledge of the platform and the brand, the American tuner was able to design something that clearly resembles an S2000 Type R.

To do this, Evasive Motorsport started by replacing the S2000's old engine with the Civic Type R FK8 engine. This is the K20C1 for insiders, a 2.0-liter turbocharged 4-cylinder engine. It develops 306 horsepower and 296 lb-ft of torque, but the tuner added some new elements in addition to a complete reprogramming which "practically doubles the power," according to what can be read in the S2000R's description sheet.

For the rest, the car has undergone heavy modifications in places to be able to accommodate all this power. The brakes have been replaced by 14-inch discs with six-piston calipers at the front and 12.9-inch discs with four-piston calipers at the rear. It benefits from new 18-inch wheels mounted on 255 millimeter wide Yokohama AD09 tires. Finally, the car has undergone all sorts of cosmetic improvements without exaggeration to look as much as possible like what Honda would have done with an S2000 Type R.

Jean-Sébastien Poudrier